Puddle for Hope

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.David Paul Morris/BloombergHow Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley. To hack is a “foundational verb at Facebook,” write Businessweek’s Brad Stone and Douglas MacMillan. “The hacker way” appears multiple times in the company’s offering prospectus as a way to describe company culture. In Menlo Park, Calif,  “hack” is spelled out large in dark cement on the quad of the company campus. Just as creative code writing spawned Facebook, the young CEO has applied a similar hacker-mentality to running a business. Stone and MacMillan cite several such hacks, including how Zuckerberg initially opted for overseas investors over Americans and the “friending” of Microsoft over Valley neighbor Google. But if the hack ethos made Facebook, it may undo it. With many hard technological problems solved, some of the most brilliant hackers are already out the door. “Zuckerberg will need a new hack for that,” they write.Consider crowdsourcing your strategy. The McKinsey Quarterly looks at several “pioneering” companies that have successfully “crowdsourced” their corporate strategy using web tools to collect, review and disseminate input from various levels of their organizations. Indian IT services firm HCL Technologies invited 8,000 employees to critique company business plans, a move which resulted in managers developing better ideas.  3M identified several new markets when it hosted an online pow-wow. But crowdsourcing requires more than using the right technology. Participants need to embrace a web-based social ethos of “ transparency, radical inclusion, egalitarianism, and peer review,” the authors write.  C-suiters, meanwhile, must consider themselves less as  “all-knowing decision makers,” and more “social architects” who “unearth the best thinking.”How Yahoo Killed Flickr. In 2006 Flickr was like Google Drive, Facebook and Instagram rolled into one. The photo-sharing web site offered free storage and superior social tools and even a pre-iPhone mobile app. Today a site visit resembles a stroll through an “exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis,” writes Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. What happened to Flickr, he concludes, is what happened to “other nimble, innovative start-ups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.” Honan details a by-now familiar Silicon Valley standoff of hackers vs. suits, community building vs. revenue-driving, and innovation vs. corp-dev requirements. As Flickr struggled to meet Yahoo demands–such as requiring a (very unpopular) Yahoo login for its service–it ceased to innovate, leaving the nascent social networking field up for grabs.CORRECTION: The story describing how Yahoo killed Flickr was written by Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. An earlier version of this article credited the wrong publication and misspelled the author’s name. We regret the error.